


Pretending

by AlwaysAkin



Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26954371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysAkin/pseuds/AlwaysAkin
Summary: Jocelyn Fairchild didn't know when she got so good at pretending.~~Or, a one-shot about my favourite underrated badass lady in the Mortal Instruments series.
Relationships: Jocelyn Fairchild & Clary Fray
Kudos: 2





	Pretending

Jocelyn Fairchild didn’t know when she got so good at pretending. 

She remembers growing up at the Fairchild manor in Idris, with Lucian and Amatis by her side, horseback riding and training and painting. She always loved the manor, the history there, so intertwined with the illustrious Fairchild legacy. 

Her family was nowhere near as influential as it was just a few decades ago, when the Fairchild’s still lived in London and their name was synonymous with Consuls and ambition. But she loves the history of the house, the sheer number of things to do and places to see, with her two best friends by her side. 

(She doesn’t notice the looks that Lucian gives her when she’s not looking. Sometimes she wishes she had.)

Jocelyn worries for Clary. Her only daughter, only living child. She’s too curious, too open to the Shadow World in all it’s forms. She feels a pang of guilt as she askes Magnus Bane to remove Clary’s memories, as she feels the weight of Luke’s disapproving stares. 

That doesn’t stop her, that will never stop her. Not as she thinks of the dead, cruel eyes of her firstborn child, and inwardly shudders. Valentine destroyed her firstborn child, she cannot let him do the same to her second. 

When she cries over the box with Jonathan’s initials on it, she doesn’t cry over what Jonathan was, but rather what he could have been. Valentine damned their son with his experiments. 

She hates Valentine with every fibre of her being, dreads his inevitable return, but she can’t regret her marriage to him. Not when it gave her Clary. There was one day, that she couldn’t quite recall, when Clary came home from school with the boy she had declared to be her new best friend in tow, all smiles, and for a second she looked so like him that Jocelyn couldn’t breathe. 

Valentine was an egomaniac and a murder, but she can never forget just how easy it was to fall in love with him, when she met him at the Academy. The star around him was so blinding, that she could hardly believe that he fell in love with her, a girl from the countryside with a long-forgotten name and no great shadow hunting talent to speak of. 

A Morgenstern may be a bright star, but it’s a falling one, and Valentine’s descent into madness happens quickly. First, there are whispers of massacres. As Jocelyn travels the streets of Idris, the few downworlders present turn away from her sharply. The whispers of Valentine’s girlfriend, circle member feel like an accusation, not as if she is ridding the world of evil. 

Then, Lucian is gone, and Stephen Herondale takes his place. She never particularly liked Stephen Herondale, and despises him once he divorces her friend Amatis for nothing but political gain. She can’t bring herself to hate sweet Celine, however, who has a talent for winning people over, who is so terribly sad. 

The Herondales are a powerful Shadowhunter family, the heads of the London Institute ever since the Clockwork War, as Stephen Herondale is so proud to tell everyone. He speaks nothing of the other part of history, of the rumour of tainted demon blood and a downworlder ancestor in his line. Valentine dismisses it as a slanderous rumour, and Jocelyn is inclined to believe him. 

(Then she meets Tessa Gray, and feels guilty for so many different reasons.) 

Jocelyn is many things over the years. She is a shadowhunter and a wife, a mother and the leader of a rebellion. She is a mother again, then a fugitive, and a captive. She reclaims her shadowhunter identity again - because there is a hole in her that never quite ceases with the pretending. 

She has loved two men in her life, but she loves her daughter more than anything else.

Because Jocelyn Fairchild has pretended to be many things, but she is always going to be a mother.


End file.
